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It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
C. S. Lewis
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Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?
C. S. Lewis
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I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.
C. S. Lewis
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We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.
C. S. Lewis
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Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.
C. S. Lewis
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The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.
C. S. Lewis
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Though it was bright sunshine everyone felt suddenly cold. The only two people present who seemed to be quite at their ease were Aslan and the Witch herself. It was the oddest thing to see those two faces - the golden face and the dead-white face so close together. Not that the Witch looked Aslan exactly in his eyes; Mrs Beaver particularly noticed this.
C. S. Lewis
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My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.
C. S. Lewis
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When there came a sound that I'd never heard the like of in all my born days. Eh, I won't forget that. The whole air was full of it, loud as thunder but far longer, cool and sweet as music over water but strong enough to shake the woods. And I said to myself, 'If that's not the Horn, call me a rabbit.
C. S. Lewis
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The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
C. S. Lewis
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I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
C. S. Lewis
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A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.
C. S. Lewis
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So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man... He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man.
C. S. Lewis
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All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
C. S. Lewis
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If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.
C. S. Lewis
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Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you--almost apart from their meaning--a thrill like music?
C. S. Lewis
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No thanks," said Digory, "I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.
C. S. Lewis
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Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
C. S. Lewis
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We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.
C. S. Lewis
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Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.
C. S. Lewis
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The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.
C. S. Lewis
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I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer.
C. S. Lewis
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Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.
C. S. Lewis
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Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.
C. S. Lewis
